Apple and Google have joined rival investor groups hoping to bag Kodak's 1,100-strong patent portfolio. The groups are offering warm-up bids of between $150m and $250m – though Kodak reckons the patents could eventually haul in up to $2.6bn.
Apple is part of a group that includes Microsoft and patent aggregation firm …

Given that Kodak have tried and failed to sue Apple and RIM I doubt Apple will get bitten. I also doubt those. patents are worth anything near what Kodak said they were worth. They are probably worth most to HTC and LG as those companies agreed to pay a licence to Kodak for patents Apple and RIM later proved to be invalid.

Re: Dear USA

No there are some that if blocked would cause problems for every device out ther, just one "Kodak is trying to recover what it claims are lost revenues from illegal use of patent '218, a patent used in previewing digital pictures, which the firm says amounts to around $1bn (£643m)."

Its 476 in Western civ again

The Real Meat of the Portfolio: OLED Patents

Kodak has historically owned many of the most fundamental patents to OLED based technology. This has long been a bane to commercial development, and it is the reason why so much of the development that surrounds the entire field of organic conductors and semiconductors (OLED, solar cells, etc.) has been done academically (where the patents don't apply with the same power).'

It is well known and well documented in many editorials and textbooks that discuss the subject of organic conductors.

they not only own formula patents on particular materials, but also process patents for manufacturing techniques.

While commercial OLED may be relatively new, the fundamental technology behind it has been studied extensively since at least the 1990s. Only recently have the manufacturing problems been worked out (primarily by Samsung), so that they can be delivered as handsets to millions of people worldwide.

Buying Kodak's portfolio would effectively solidify Samsungs already major lead in this particular field of technology, and I would expect them to make one of the larger pushes to buy it up.

Apple and LG will probably counter. Apple wants to limit Samsung's power and reign in on their smartphone's hardware dominance, while LG wants to muscle their way into the OLED field (as evidenced by their offerings at this years CES)

Samsung already owns many of the most important patents related to OLED, which is why they are the ONLY company that makes high resolution OLED displays. OLED is actually quite common, but the majority of it is used in things like Casio watches, oven-displays, and generally as replacements for low resolution TFT readouts of the past.

Samsung owns the crucial manufacturing patents for the technology that has only been realized in the past 5 years. Before that time, manufacturing large high resolution OLED displays that could be use with frame rates relevant for displaying film or TV was a painstaking process that would occupy the majority of the top-level R&D lab of a major electronics manufacturer for 6 months at a time.

Sony once tried it as essentially a publicity stunt, selling the displays at a massive loss (15" non-HD display for $2,000 MSRP, and they only sold a few thousand globally).

since then Sony has never even attempted a true foray into the field.

Samsung, and now LG, are the only companies making any real attempts at OLED for the commercial display sector. Phones already use AMOLED screens and Samsung sells these screens to a variety of other hardware makers.

Samsung and LG have both promised OLED based television sets in Q4 of 2012 (yeah right) but expect them within 2 years.

Apple WANTED to put the OLED screens in multiple generations of the iPhone, but Samsung could never guarantee the necessary supply chain for Apple's needs, so Apple instead went with a traditional LCD based technology.

Those 3 companies will try the hardest for this portfolio for this reason only.